Infidelities

by Josip Novakovich

  When the surgeon came by, and saw them, with Ranko sitting on a chair at David’s bedside, and David propped up, he was startled. The surgeon looked confused for a second, and said, “David, that’s just great. Here, I was going to check…oh, never mind. Just great. Still, what are the two of you doing? You should not be exhausting each other! Ranko, please let him rest.”

  “Chess is not tiring,” said Ranko.

  “It’s a sport,” said the surgeon. “Mental sport. David’s brain mustn’t work too hard now. Who knows what tricks…. Look at Karpov, how thin and exhausted he looks.”

  As they talked, David fell asleep; he snored, a thin, weak snore, breathing shallow.

  “So where is that mysterious heart?” asked Ranko. “In the freezer?”

  “No, still in a rib cage,” said the surgeon, winked, and pointed with his blue chin toward David.

  “What? You are going to tear his heart out to give it to me?”

  “He should have been dead by now. I wonder how he hangs in.”

  “Chess keeps him going, he loves chess.”

  “Don’t play it with him then. He’s going to die soon anyway—I don’t see how he could recover—but you don’t want it to go on too long, for his heart might deteriorate, and it won’t do you any good.”

  Ranko watched David, feeling like a predator. He would have liked getting an abstract heart, a heart from a laboratory, even an electronic computerized heart, better than to wait for a friend’s heart, for by now David had become his friend. What a crazy thing, to wait for a friend to die, to want it to happen quickly. On the other hand, David was in pain, and maybe a fast death would be the best for him, for both of them. Should he tell David about this? David must know, he must have volunteered his heart.

  Should he go over to David’s side, and just choke him? That would put him out of misery, and his heart would still be good. Then he could call the doctors. How many minutes did they have after the clinical death for the heart to still be good?

  He was ashamed of his thought. But maybe it was his only chance to remain alive himself. The Satan of survival must have whispered that thought to him. Didn’t Satan in the Garden of Eden promise immortality, or were there two trees, one with the knowledge of good and evil, and the other, with eternal life. Eve ate the wrong apple. But maybe it was a heart she needed. Maybe there was a tree on which hearts grew. Apples look like hearts anyway. He looked again at David, listened to his troubled and wet breathing, and imagined there was a good heart there, a heart that could beat in his own chest. He shuddered with revulsion at the thought. So it’s not only the tissue that rejects the foreign organ, it’s the mind, or probably primarily the mind, which suffuses the body. Each time he looked at David’s rib cage, he winced. His wince became a tick.

  Lana brought him a small stereo system and a few CDs. “You don’t mind if I play some music softly?” he asked David.

  “What kind?”

  “Bach and stuff like that.”

  “I never went in for classical music, but maybe I’ll like it now. I never gave it a shot, was too busy.”

  Ranko played Piano Concerto No. 4 by Beethoven. David soon fell asleep. Ranko used to love the allegro movements most of all, but now he preferred the adagio. Everything about him was a bit slower now. Even his laughter had a slower rhythm, his conversation did too—it was as though he had slowed the harmony of an orchestra to adagio, to savor each note, to get the feeling out of each string, to let it be…to give up.

  David awoke and smiled. “Man, that is beautiful. If I could live again, I’d listen to this before falling asleep every night, I swear.”

  “But wait till you hear this one!” Ranko played Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, with Rostropovich.

  “That’s gorgeous, my God,” David said. During the second movement, tears flowed down his cheeks.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Don’t you hear it? It’s a funeral march. I heard that melody at my father’s funeral—a brass band played it. They missed many notes, but that made it all the sadder, like the world was falling apart, and it was. He fell into the sea while fishing and drowned; probably died of a heart attack before he drowned. I hope he did, though I don’t know what difference it would make now.”

  “Sorry,” Ranko said.

  “I remember how he taught me snorkeling when I was five—he held me under my ribs, they tickled, I struggled not to laugh, and when I opened my eyes, there was a whole dark heaven below us with yellow and blue fish shooting across like shooting stars and comets. That made the world right for me: a slow heaven above and a fast one below. And I remember how I used to sit on his knee, and he sang about…”

  Suddenly, two male nurses opened and banged the doors. They grabbed David and carried him away while he swore.

  “But wait, he’s alive! Where are you taking him?” said Ranko.

  “He needs treatment,” one of them said.

  Are they going to kill him? To bring me his heart? The idea chilled Ranko. Did his friends and his wife pay the bribe after all, a payment which bought David’s speedy exodus from life? Do the doctors send people into the parking lots to shoot robust looking men for their organs? Or maybe they could help David after all?

  A day passed, and David hadn’t returned. A new patient was brought in, this time, another man waiting for a heart transplant. He did not play chess, and he did not like to talk. He merely panted, wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his swollen hand and kept repeating, Jesus, Jesus. He fingered a rosary made out of gold nuggets, small nuggets, but nevertheless, nuggets, and quickly whispered a Hail Mary.

  He was overweight, unshaven, bald, with big ears. Ranko thought he recognized the face from the newspapers. Wasn’t he one of the generals the government was supposed to hand over to The Hague?

  As though divining his thoughts, the general looked at him fiercely, his thick and horned eyebrows adding to the menace. He buzzed for a nurse to come in, and when she did, he said, “I need a room all to myself. This is a disgrace.”

  “But we are short on space. Nearly all the rooms are like this, most of them have a dozen people in, and…”

  “I want a single.”

  Soon, he was whisked away by a different set of male nurses.

  A day later, the surgeon came to Ranko. “You are free to go home.” He looked contrite.

  “What happened to the heart?”

  “Don’t ask. It’s a sad story.”

  “How about David, did he make it?”

  “He died pretty fast. I don’t think he felt a thing—he passed out and away.”

  “And his heart?”

  “It was taken out, and transplanted.”

  “Transplanted? Where?”

  “The idiots should have examined the heart. Instead, as soon as they could, they put it into the man who was in your room.”

  “But I thought I was top of the list.”

  “You were. But then, the man needed it more. He was in worse shape than you. And we tested it chemically; his tissue was less likely to reject that heart.”

  “But I have waited longer.”

  “I agree with you. I wanted you to have the heart. But…higher forces. He was an army general. Anyway, you were lucky.”

  “Lucky, how? How come they didn’t do it in the military hospital?”

  “Hearts are hard to come by.”

  “So how’s the general doing? How much did he pay in bribes?”

  “He’s not doing. He’s dead.”

  “Wow! Why, what went wrong?” Suddenly, Ranko was terrified. That could have been him. He was ready to hate the man, but now he felt some kind of sympathy, such as can be felt for the dead, more terror than compassion.

  “The heart was bad.”

  “Did you do the transplant?”

  “No, another surgeon, a military one. There were guards in front of the operating room. Not even I was allowed in during the operation. I was upset about the whole thing.”

  “D
id David’s staying alive longer ruin the heart? Did I contribute to it?”

  “No, the heart was faulty to begin with. They never properly examined it. It had a perforated septum. Idiots!”

  “Lucky? To wait for a surgery like this again?”

  “Lucky. You are alive.”

  “But I won’t last.”

  “Lord knows. If you hang in, we’ll find you another heart, and I personally will examine it with isotopes. And you may luck out.”

  “Now this general,” Ranko said, “when was he diagnosed?”

  “Don’t ask. I know nothing about it.” The surgeon shook his head.

  AT HOME, even as he poured water into a round samovar, he kept thinking. What happened? He conceived theories. One: the man in the parking lot who shot David was hired by the general, so the general could get a heart. Assassination, not politically motivated, but medically. Heart theft. And they sent in for Ranko as a decoy, so it wouldn’t be all too visible what was going on. Now, that’s the theory according to which the general is in control. The second theory, perhaps intertwined with the first: procuring the general a faulty heart was intentional, to engineer his death. He died in surgery and therefore did not need to be assassinated, so doubts would not be aroused that Tudjman was behind it. And Tudjman, of course, would not want a well-informed general in The Hague, who could reveal that the dictates for several atrocities came directly from Tudjman. This is more subtle than what Milosevic did in Serbia, orchestrating a whole series of mafia-style executions, in hotel lobbies, with masked sharpshooters hitting war criminals in the head, through their eyeballs, as was the case with Arkan. But who would know about this, that it may have been an assassination? So they knew very well that heart was bad, they wanted it like that. They followed a man with a bad heart to make sure. David was dying too long, too. He did not look like he was dying, but who would know? Maybe his death was assisted? These thoughts made Ranko shiver. And maybe David too could have been a witness, and his assassination was a real one, Serbian style. Ranko’s mind was going berserk. All these theories, he was getting paranoid.

  Ranko was happy at home, drinking his Red Zinger. Another day in paradise, another day on earth. There’s only earth and hell, he thought. Or paradise and hospital.

  “Where’s your cell phone?” asked Lana.

  “I threw it away.”

  “What for? That’s a terrible waste!”

  “If there’s a heart, I don’t want to know about it.” He sighed and gasped. Although he was in paradise, he did not feel good.

  Ranko drew the curtains off the window and now they both stood before the glass. Ahead of them they saw Mount Sljeme—above the pair of pointed white-stone cathedral steeples and the red roofs of the Gornji Grad, the mountain sprawled and rose above a layer of thin clouds, which skirted it. The very tip was covered with snow, and he imagined it to be so chilly that it could bring him out of his warm, humid, and sweaty medicated haze. What if he died and never touched and smelled mountain snow again? The thought filled him with longing and craving—if he could only be there, just for one hour, that would be as good as any rest of a lifetime. It would be a good way to go. “Let’s go to the mountains and look for mushrooms,” he said.

  “Are you crazy, in this cold weather?”

  “Yes, especially in this cold. There are oyster mushrooms, growing out of dead trees, out of beeches, wonderfully new, cool, snowy, crystalline.” He wheezed and whispered and moved closer to her ear, and looked at her lobe, where a small crystal earring flickered; the ear appeared to him to be an oyster mushroom, twisted and fanned out, and it even smelled like soiled forest winds in the winter. He leaned closer and nibbled on her ear.

  Snow Powder

  Large snowflakes floated in the wind like dove feathers. Mirko leaned his head against the windowpane and gazed up the hill into the mountains shrouded in the pale clouds and snow, and he grew joyfully dizzy.

  He stumbled to the basement and waited for his eyes to get used to the dark, with a few streaks of light hitting a sack of sprouting potatoes. His skis emerged out of the dark and shone seemingly by an independent source of beige light from within, from the soul of the old wood. Mirko gingerly touched these smooth ghosts of former winters and took them up the stairs while they clanked and fenced with each other. He waxed them with beeswax and shined them with his woolen socks. He walked to the yard gate, an old rusty squeal-making contraption on loose hinges.

  Where are you going? You have to do homework and get ready for school!

  Mommy, look at all that beautiful snow.

  Yes, I understand that. But you got math to do.

  I am good at math.

  You won’t be if you don’t keep up.

  Mirko ran into the yard and skied between the woodshed and the former goat stall. The town ordinance no longer allowed keeping goats within town limits. Just two blocks away, one could keep goats.

  The moist chill on his cheeks and the snow behind his shirt collar gave him a delicious shiver.

  Soon, Boro, his younger brother, joined him, and they enjoyed a snowball fight until their fingers turned red and sore. Mirko laughed at Boro because his face had turned into a semblance of a red and green apple—green chin and lips and red cheeks and nose.

  Later, Mirko walked to school, with his fingers itching even under his fingernails in the gloves. The first class was his favorite, geography. He knew all the highest peaks on every continent, the longest rivers, the deepest ocean trenches. The topic was Antarctica and the global warming effect. The teacher, Medic, an elderly woman with gray hair and small eyes, which gleamed from a reddish darkness of swollen eyelids, kept talking about how Western industrial nations had been trapping heat within the atmosphere.

  Does it mean the highest peak will go down? Mirko asked. Now it’s 4,987 meters high.

  That’s an interesting question, she said. We’ll have to figure it out.

  But it’s made of rock, unlike the North Pole.

  Bravo. So it won’t go down with the melting.

  Maybe it will, he said. How many feet that make the top are made of ice or glacier?

  We’d have to look it up.

  And if the ice melts all over the world, the sea level will rise, and so that’ll cut down the space above the sea level, too, won’t it?

  You are right about that, she said. Brilliant for a ten-year-old. I am going to give you an A for this.

  She opened the grade book and with her trembling and swollen hand she wrote a large A in red.

  But that did not make Mirko happy—the world was melting away; what was a grade compared with the world? He gazed through the windows and watched the thickly falling snow. Tree branches were covered with it, the top half white, the bottom brown—darker than usual because it was wet—divided like a flag. He wondered whether there was a flag in that color combination and couldn’t think of any. And why wouldn’t there be a flag, half white and half black? What would it symbolize? Peace and death? Peaceful death? Deadly peace? Surrender and go to church? None of it sounded appealing.

  The evergreens, white and green, made the right color combination for a flag, but not the right shape, with snow-laden branches bending.

  The bell rang for the recess. He hopped down the wooden stairs, which squeaked and thudded and sang, as though his feet were fingertips bouncing on worn and untuned piano keys. In the schoolyard, he kneeled and hugged snow into a little heap, which he then squeezed with his palms and rolled. The wet snow made a quickly growing ball after which the cobbled pavement was laid bare, in an ever larger trail.

  Suddenly an iced snowball hit him on his right ear so that it rang with a brimming pain, and a high pitch, like that of a struck tuning fork, remained in his ear. He got up to see who threw the ball, but he couldn’t. A boy grabbed him from behind, and pulled him down to the ground. Another one punched him and shouted, That’ll teach you, you nerd, to show off in class.

  Is that what you do, just read books? No wonder you’re
so weak!

  He wiggled to get out from under them.

  The bell rang to signal the end of the recess.

  The boys got up. Mirko ran after them and tripped the slower one, who fell right in front of the math teacher, a chubby, red-faced man with white hair.

  The teacher scrutinized the boys, lit his grainy cigarette with a match, waved the flame quickly out of its life after which a trail of thin sulphurous smoke remained and he went on his way to the classroom without a word. The boys followed, inhaling the incendiary and unfiltered aroma of his anger.

  Stand up, you Maric, the teacher called, and blew out thick white smoke, which seemed to make his white hair expand, while his red face diminished almost to the red center of an enlivened cigarette tip.

  Mirko did.

  Is that the way to behave?

  The boy who fell sobbed and wiped his cheeks but there were no tears on them.

  Teacher, the two of them attacked me during the recess and I tried to get back at them.

  That’s a fine way to go. Let me see your homework.

  I forgot my notebook at home.

  But you did the homework? All right, then you know how to do complex division, expressing the remainder in decimals. Come to the blackboard and let’s see whether you’ve learned anything.

  Mirko stood in front of the blackboard, trying to ignore the incessant tuning fork pitch in his ear, and perhaps because of the pitch, he had no stage fright. He solved the problem accurately.

  Nerd, nerd! the boys shouted.

  Just ignore them, said the teacher and slid his yellow fingers into Mirko’s uncombed curly brown hair, and he ruffled his hair in this nicotined blessing so much that Mirko felt static in his scalp, a manifestation of pride, which traveled down his spine and decayed into revulsion low in his abdomen.

  Mirko looked into the rows of kids, and saw his favorite girl, Bojana, smile at him. He was blissful as he looked into her green eyes framed by black lashes.

  During the break, he followed Bojana outside.